A Matter of Patience: A GaixSaku Prompt Collection
by emeraldteardrops
Summary: Summary: Infatuation had broken her down, left her with not much love to give. But each time Sakura tried to tell him so, he just smiled patiently and held her hand a little tighter. Gai always had been good with building people back from the ground up.


**A/N **I was rereading my GaixSaku Drabbles, and felt the urge to write a sequel of prompt responses. Please read that first if you haven't already, these will make more sense that way.

**Accident**: She's spent years watching him and her sensei compete with each other, and she usually ignores their battles because it's kind of annoying when it isn't completely disturbing; Sakura wasn't sure who was winning the "who can eat the most ramen while doing a handstand blindfolded" contest, but when she left the food booth, unknowingly forgetting her worn copy of Icha Icha at the counter, Gai threw away fifteen bowls worth of blindfolded ramen consumption to jog after her and hand it back.

**Broken**: Her arm is in two parts but there's a kunai buried in Tenten's abdomen, and Sakura knows her priorities so she fights past the pain and the dizziness and heals Tenten first instead of herself; Tsunade will chastise her later when she reads Gai's report because healing while injured is more dangerous (what was she thinking?), but Sakura can't explain to Tsunade that the fear in Gai's eyes as he held his teammate had made her _act_ and not think, and she didn't regret those actions for a minute.

**Callous**: They say she's still in love with Sasuke and that's why she doesn't date, but the truth is that her heart isn't anyone's anymore; instead it is merely hardened and sits mostly unused in the center of her chest, and if it hurts Sakura to not love the way she wants to, it's not like she has a place to direct that love anymore anyways.

**Darkness**: She lives with Ino, but even as her friend sleeps in the next room over, the darkness of the apartment and of her thoughts pushes the kunoichi to the roof, to the moon, to the light; she sees him a few rooftops over, practicing katas under the moonlight, and the smooth confident motions remind her that there is order and serenity even in the darkest of nights.

**Evening**: The whole group is out on the town, and Ino and Kiba are drunk and happy and having an "on" night, meaning that Sakura is most likely sleeping at Naruto's so she doesn't have to hear anything that will scar her for life; Naruto's place is a little dirty and has a weird smell, so when she takes her time walking across the rooftops to that side of town, she makes sure to pass by the jounin that is always practicing near her home and she gives him a little wave just because.

**Fickle**: Sakura isn't very good at keeping her plants alive, they always seem to want to die on her no matter how much she fights with the fickle creatures, and after one particularly awful mission she tears up when she finds her basil plant has wilted again while she was gone; she replaces it and this one lives when the rest continue to die, and it isn't until a few months later that she realizes that someone's been watering it when she's gone on missions so that she never leaves death and comes home to it as well.

**Green**: She was a seasoned shinobi, but she was a green kunoichi and often the seduction missions went badly for her; it was common practice for an elite jounin to provide backup for some of the most…_difficult_ kunoichi missions, and as Sakura sat staring silently into the fire, Gai draped a second field blanket over her slender shoulders and decided that her healing skills had taken away all the bruises except for the bruised look in her eyes.

**Heavy**: This last mission had been a rough one and it had left her quiet and not herself; the first time that Sakura laughed was two weeks later when she saw a furious Kakashi in a dress chasing around a jubilant Gai in a green spandex suit covered in white paint spots, and even though neither ever explained why, she still felt better for having seen it.

**Ice** **Cream**: On a whim, Sakura challenged Gai to an arm wrestling match in front of both Team Gai and Team Kakashi; fifteen matches later, Gai bought her a chocolate ice cream cone and rubbed his wrist and tried not to notice how pretty she looked when she seemed so damn pleased with herself.

**Jounin**: She had passed the jounin tests last year, but sometimes the older jounin forgot their students had progressed as far as they had; Sakura didn't mind because Kakashi was…well…Kakashi, although she had to admit that she got a little jealous that Maito Gai remembered not only his team's birthdays but _also_ their rank days, to which Kakashi idly patted her head and told her she'd make chunin next year.

**Kill**: That solo mission had almost gotten him killed, and she spent nearly a week at his bedside fighting to keep Gai stable; she spent a second week at his bedside playing thumb war with him to keep him from being bored, because of all his many parts, his hand was the only thing that she'd managed to completely unbind from the forbidden binding jutsu they'd slammed him with.

**Lean**: He can't walk by himself yet, and she knows the wheelchair is humiliating for him, so Sakura and Gai walk the hospital grounds twice a day together; he leans on her gratefully, and she listens to his stories with a smile, because she likes how when it's just them, his stories are always about the people and things that matter to her.

**Missing**: It takes them a month to find where Sasuke lured Naruto, and the entire time he's missing, Sakura is frightening to death; she makes sure to hide this when she and Kakashi and Sai bring a dejected Naruto back to the village, and as she limps home to her still living basil plant, Gai follows at a discreet distance, and she's too overwhelmed with emotion to ask why.

**Nice**: Sakura thinks that Gai is a generally nice person, even when he gets loud and obnoxious, but somewhere along the line he stopped being obnoxious and just became Gai; everyone but Sakura notices that she's seeking out his company more and more these days, and the smile that keeps coming to her lips is pretty nice too.

**Owned**: Sakura has been standing up for herself since she learned she was really good at beating people into a bloody pulp, but when that Sand nin insults her, Gai takes exception to it before she has a chance to step forward; as Gai cheerfully wipes the Sand nin all over the town, lecturing him on the proper respect ladies were due, Sakura tips her head to the side and wonders why Gai is hurting the nin a little more than is necessary or normal for the green clad shinobi.

**Priority**: There were a lot of injured, but her team had priority and so did his; Sakura was dressed down by Tsunade later for showing favoritism, and it was only then that it occurred to her that she had made sure to heal what mattered to her _and_ Gai the most over who needed healing the most, and she wasn't sure whether to be confused or ashamed.

**Quiet**: He was loud and so was she, but she could also be very quiet too, and the first time she shyly climbed up on the nearby roof asked if he wanted to watch a movie with her because she couldn't sleep, she expected him to talk loudly the entire way through it if he actually agreed to watch it with her; somewhere close to three in the morning, Sakura fell asleep on Gai's shoulder, lost in the comfort of his quiet steady breathing and soft chuckles at what they were only half watching.

**Release**: It's the best fight she's had in months, and the good part about this one is that she knows as much as she may be hurting, she's not going to die at the end of it; dirty and sweaty and bloody and exultant, Sakura faces off with a grinning Gai and murmurs, "Again."

**Stolen**: She keeps stealing looks at him from across the bar, shifting in her seat and gnawing at her straw; he's caught her attention, although she's still not sure what she wants from him, and it takes two drinks and Genma being an ass, but at least he's coming over here finally.

**Tentative**: Sakura asks Gai to walk her home and as they sit by her basil plant, she jokingly asks him if he's green from neck to ankle from all the years of the spandex suits; Gai chuckles and rolls up his sleeve to prove he was still normal colors, but the dark tattooing covering that arm distracts her even though she's seen it before when he was under her care, and her tentative touch on his skin makes them both go quiet, unsure of what is supposed to happen next.

**Uncle**: He brings her flowers and wears a nice suit and takes her to a very expensive restaurant on their first date, and Sakura falls apart completely, so nervous that she can barely talk, her hands shaking as she tries and fails to eat her food; when he seems worried about what he must have done wrong, she admits that this was her first real date, and as she apologizes in humiliation for how badly she ruined such a nice evening, Gai smiles and pins her against her front door, tickling her until she's shaking from laughter and is forced to cry uncle, falling apart in a much better way.

**Vibrant**: He's full of life, and she spends her days saving life, and she likes the proof of that vibrancy to surround her; she's beautiful on the outside, but hardened and hurt on the inside, so when he sees her eyes light up like that, it changes him and makes him want to be more, and makes him want to show her the best parts of life that she's been missing.

**Water**: The second date is better, she only shakes once, and it's when he tugs her into the freezing cold water after his shirtless form; the moon's reflection ripples and spreads as they swim at the river's edge, and he pins her again, this time against his wet muscled chest, and he waits until she stretches up on her tiptoes before leaning down and brushing his warm lips across her own chattering ones.

**X**: His arms make an x as they cross over her stomach, and Sakura thinks it feels nice to rest her weight against his, safe in his arms and under his protective gaze as they watch late night television on her couch; she doesn't know how she slept this deeply because she never sleeps the whole night through and the sunlight is slipping through the window shades, but when she shifts, he murmurs wordlessly to her, and she's lost in dreams before she even really ever wakes up.

**Youth**: He's always going on and on about the importance and beauty of youthfulness, but there's a patience in his eyes and words that tells silently of wisdom born from time and experience; it isn't youth that guides his hands and mouth over her skin for the first time, drawing soft cries of pleasure from her lips, and it isn't youth that knows she's not ready for him to stay the night with her afterwards, not now, not yet.

**Zero**: Sasuke was an atomic bomb that had torn through her team's lives, leaving all of them scarred, and in her case, her heart and sense of trust were ground zero; Sakura slips her hand into Gai's and he smiles, bumping their shoulders playfully before backing off and giving her a little more space, a little more time, a little more understanding, because Gai always has been good with building back people from the ground up.


End file.
